A Land Divided: The Armenia/Azerbaijan Crisis : CHAPTER 4: THE TROOPS : Kremlin Acts to Restore Civil Order

Shortly after midnight Saturday, Jan. 20, Nakhichevan political leader Sakina Ali-Ava went on television to declare her autonomous region’s secession from the Soviet Union. The stunning and provocative announcement was timed to coincide with a similar declaration by Azerbaijan.

But Azerbaijan’s broadcast never made the air. It was preempted by the Soviet army.

In a swift and unambiguous surprise attack, Soviet armored and infantry units swept through the rebellious Azerbaijani capital of Baku, starting in the northern suburbs, rolling over any makeshift barricades in their path and firing on anyone who challenged them.

The size and ferocity of the Soviet force--later criticized as excessively brutal by Azerbaijani leaders and even by some Russians--was in marked contrast to earlier military intervention in the region. Smaller, lightly equipped Soviet patrols sent to protect Armenian villages and round up guerrillas were often overwhelmed or easily repulsed by superior partisan forces in the week before the army moved on Baku.

As Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers streamed in, tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis huddled around bonfires built in the roughly paved streets of the historic port city, vowing to resist what they said was an “occupation army.” But this time, even with their stolen weapons, they were no match for Soviet troops in brutal head-to-head street fighting.

The death toll in the Soviet push quickly surpassed the 72 lives lost in the anti-Armenian pogrom of a week before--a grim fact that drew little sympathy among the bitter survivors of that violence who were recovering from their wounds in Yerevan and Moscow.

“My God, I’m glad they are dead! Let them all be killed,” said Satenik Karapetian, 84, on news of the death toll in Baku. “If I had one of them here--and I am an old woman--I would tear him apart, limb from limb!”

Pushed off the streets by superior firepower, the Azerbaijani militants turned to guerrilla tactics. Tanks were taunted onto streets narrow enough to hamper their mobility, then pelted with gasoline bombs and hand grenades tossed from open windows or flat rooftops. Foot soldiers were assaulted in hit-and-run raids by motorcycle gunmen. Utilities were disrupted. A general strike brought Baku, on the surface at least, to a standstill.

Although sporadic fire fights were heard near the barracks on Salyansky Street, where military cadets declared an open insurrection, taunting symbolic attacks were the generally preferred weapon against the Soviets: Black mourning flags appeared on buildings and cars, wrecked trucks and buses once used as barricades were buried in flowers, and oil tankers in the harbor sounded choruses of plaintive horns at regular intervals.

A tense order was maintained in most of the city by flooding districts with tanks and other armored vehicles and stationing troops every five feet along city streets, the nationalist Azerbaijani Popular Front reported from the still-closed capital. Despite this, the group says it erects new barricades each day, and Soviet officials accuse it of renewing violent assaults on Armenians--43 in one day alone.

Indeed, civil authorities grew so worried about the potential for renewed pogroms--against ethnic Russians and Jews as well as Armenians--that they started making plans to resume mass evacuations, plans that would lead to another bloody confrontation only a few days later.

In the meantime, Azerbaijani fighters outside Baku kept up their guerrilla raids in Armenia. Azerbaijanis fired rockets on Yeraskh from hills in nearby Nakhichevan, killing three men and wounding four. Civilian casualties were minimal because the village had been emptied of women and children. But the attackers succeeded in destroying the village winery--a serious blow to a region so heavily dependent on the wine trade--before 500 Armenian militiamen could arrive from Yerevan, 35 miles to the north, to drive them away.

Armenians retaliated by attacking the Azerbaijani village of Tadan. The number of casualties there is still unknown.

Soviet authorities had their hands full in Baku with a massive rally--formally outlawed-- that began with 1,000 women in black conducting a mourning ceremony in the Old City for the hundreds and hundreds of Azerbaijanis reported to have been killed in the Soviet sweep into the city. Official assurances that the deaths numbered no more than 83 were ignored by the throng, which assembled in Freedom Square--called Lenin Square until now--and walked slowly through the city to hilltop Kirov Park, where 119 freshly dug graves awaited the new “martyrs.”

Along the parade route, people defiantly tore up or burned their Communist Party membership cards and chanted, “Azadlyg! Azadlyg!”--”Freedom! Freedom!” An Azerbaijani lawyer working for an independent citizens commission investigating the army’s actions said by telephone that he had counted 94 coffins in the procession, which was accompanied by a chilling cacophony of hundreds of ambulance sirens, car horns and factory whistles.

The tense peace of the funeral procession did not last for long. The next night, an equally large but much angrier crowd moved in the opposite direction--toward the port, where hundreds of Armenians, Russians and Jews were gathered to await evacuation by ship. That evacuation was blocked, however, by a flotilla of boats ranging from trawlers to tankers formed ostensibly to prevent authorities from removing the bodies of Azerbaijani demonstrators in an effort to conceal the number of people killed in protests.

Fears about the real intent of the blockade were fed by what the Soviet newspaper Izvestia called “the horrible rumor that the city’s remaining Russian residents will have to answer” for the military intervention. Jews and Azerbaijanis who sympathized with Armenians also were reportedly targeted for attack that night.

So with the demonstrators closing in on the port, authorities decided to break the blockade by force, opening fire on the outlaw vessels. Many were sunk during the 40-minute fusillade. The refugees, eventually, were able to flee.